Along with technical development for terminals, more and more applications may be installed on a terminal. The terminal may include one of: a smart phone, a tablet, a laptop, a smart watch, or other electronic device that can install an application. In order to protect personal privacy of a user, a terminal may provide a password protection function for the application installed on the terminal. Specifically, the terminal may set a unified triggering password for all installed applications, and the user may select to enable the password protection function for some applications. When the terminal detects triggering operation of the user over the password protection function for any application, the set triggering password is determined as a triggering password of the application. When the terminal detects the triggering operation over the application, it is verified whether a password input by the user is consistent with the triggering password or not, and the application is triggered if YES.
At present, in order to meet a requirement of logging of a user in the same application with multiple user accounts, a terminal may create another instance for the installed application. The created instance may be considered as a mirror of an original instance, and has all functions of the application. Each instance corresponds to an application icon. The abovementioned password protection function may also be adopted for the situation that an application corresponds to multiple instances, and the method is specifically as follows. When password protection is enabled for the application, the terminal may set a triggering password of to activate each instance of the application. When detecting triggering operation over an application icon of any instance of the application, the terminal prompts the user to input a password, verifies whether the input password is consistent with the triggering password or not. When the input password is consistent with the triggering password, the terminal triggers the instance corresponding to the application icon.